Pages

Monday, January 12, 2009

GC: Imp Faerie Fire not intended to work with Feral FF.

Update: Ghostcrawler made another post regarding Improved Faerie Fire. You can find it here and I have quoted it in full at the bottom. It doesn't really add anything to the conversation. My opinion it comes down to this. Even if it's not working as intended there is no reason to "fix it" because it's not "broke." Moonkin are clearly not overpowered relative to other classes.

Foofy, a Moonkin Repository Moderator, has been on a quest lately to figure out if Imp FF works with someone else's Faerie Fire. She has done some testing on the target dummies. She talked to a GMin game for quite a while to try and get answers from him, and he indicated that Imp FF should work with FFF. She had a screenshot of the comment up but it appears to have been taken down. Finally she made a post on the Damage Dealing forum asking GC for an answer and bumped it regularly. Her persistence was rewarded with a response.

I am almost positive the talent is looking at your spells. So if you cast Wrath, it does a check to see if you also have FF up on the target.

The intent of the talent is to encourage you to cast Faerie Fire, compensating you alittle for the fact that you are debuffing the target. It isn't intended to just be "here have some crit." The intent is that if you cast FF, even if the debuff is already on the mob, you are rewarded for it.

I suspect it isn't smart enough to detect Feral Faerie Fire now that it's a base spell, so we should probably fix the case of a Balance druid who casts FFF and then goes back to Wrath or whatever.

I am just guessing based on the way spells usually work. I did not try this myself so I could be wrong.

I will also admit that there are some inconsistencies currently in the game between whether you are supposed to apply a debuff again on a mob that already has it (because sometimes you get a "More Powerful Spell" error). This is something we're trying to clean up though.

So, you may now be asking yourself: What does this mean? In my opinion, very little.

First off, GC seems to be talking of the cuff. This is the way he thinks it should work, but he probably doesn't know the coding completely and hasn't thought about it much. That is the impression I get.

I still think Imp FF works with Feral FF, but there is more testing needed, and several people have stepped up to say they are going to do it. Unfortunately, I don't know anyone that is heavily into pvp or a feral druid so I can't test it myself.

If it does work, I'm not sure what we should expect. It's clear that GC would consider it a bug, and it may be fixed in a future patch. On the other hand, its clear that Moonkin are not OP DPS killing all of the charts. I wouldn't be surprised if blizz treated this as a happy accident and let it stand even if it wasn't intended.

I know that some of you are probably wondering: Should I spec into IFF or not? Really I think it is up to you if you have a Feral Druid and Shadow Priest in raid. I still think it will help you but if you would prefer to have more mana regen, Gale Winds, or Imp IS then go for it. If you don't have a Feral Druid or Shadow Priest in raid regularly then you should spec into IFF and casting FF anyway.

The second GC post:

I am saying the tooltip, which currently reads:

Your Faerie Fire spell also increases the chance the target will be hit by spell attacks by 3%, and increases the critical strike chance of your damage spells by 3% on targets afflicted by Faerie Fire.

Should probably read:

Your Faerie Fire and Feral Faerie Fire spells also increase the chance the targetwill be hit by spell attacks by 3%, and increase the critical strike chance of your damage spells by 3% on targets afflicted by your Faerie Fire or Feral Faerie Fire.

One of the issues we are currently discussing is what to do in the case where someone chooses a talent that they end up not using because someone else in the group also has the same buff of equal or greater potency. To be fair though this is not a new problem. Raids always had to manage buffs like Spirit or Kings that were talented. I think groups usually worked around that by just grouping with the same people a lot and making sure someone had the talent. We are seeing a lot more raids pugged these days, and in any case, you often still want the buff when you are soloing. It is something we're discussing.